European Judaism

At the time of writing this editorial Londoners are still coming to terms with the terrorist bomb attacks in July. Jewish communities have been put on special alert as potential targets. A backlash against the Muslim community has been one inevitable result and Jewish voices have been strong in condemning such a response. The long term commitment to interfaith dialogue, often expressed in the pages of this journal, is one of the essential elements in challenging ideologies that foster the murderous violence of the bombers, and the crude brutalities of those who target Muslims in response.

As writers and film makers we have the privilege of being able to make our views known through our work. Each time we draw attention to the Holocaust we are, I believe, educating, reminding, warning and proclaiming as loudly as we can our support for Israel's continued existence. I do not look for the themes about which I write, they look for me. I nurse the hope that those themes will either become less obsessive or go hunting elsewhere, perhaps to alight on new, younger writers and film makers. I long for other themes to find me and provide respite. But that, I know, may be a forlorn hope. I also long for films and plays about the Holocaust to become less and less necessary but that, too, I suspect is a forlorn hope.

Psychotherapy – under Reshetnikov's influence – has already become a profitable and desirable profession with accredited qualifications that reflect European standards. Its skilled practitioners are still busy competing with national predilections for occult alternatives that state registered quacksalvers continue to peddle but in St. Petersburg it is turning into the preferred treatment for alienated and impoverished professionals and the 'New Russians' alike.

At the end of the war the German Occupier declared Antwerp Judenrein. In his Ph.D. thesis Vreemdelingen in een wereldstad, historian Lieven Saerens has demonstrated that a general anti-semitic climate had already surfaced in Antwerp in the 1930s. During the occupation, more Jews fell prey to persecution and annihilation in Antwerp than in any other Belgian city, partly due to the negligent attitude of the local authorities. Nevertheless, already in the first year after the liberation Jewish life in Antwerp was back on its feet. This contribution focuses on the settlement of the practical and legal consequences of the war and on the early reconstruction of Jewish life in Antwerp immediately after the war.

Mokum is 'Amsterdam' in the local dialect of Yiddish. Deriving from the Hebrew word makom, meaning 'place', Mokum affectionately designates the Dutch capital as 'the place' for Jews. Judith Belinfante, director of Amsterdam's Jewish Historical Museum from 1976 to 1998, explained: 'Amsterdam was, for a long time, the only place where Jews could come without any restrictions'. Already in the early seventeenth century, Jews began arriving, from Portugal and from Central and Eastern Europe. And, in contrast to the rest of Europe, in Amsterdam, they were given unlimited freedom to settle, and were never confined to ghettos, or forced to wear a distinctive sign. The extent of Jewish institutional integration in Amsterdam, and today, throughout the Netherlands, is nowhere more evident than in the history and exhibitions of Amsterdam's Jewish Historical Museum. It's a classical Heimat or 'home town' museum. It celebrates the city, and displays Amsterdam and Dutch Jewry as a dynamic, loyal and well-integrated minority.

The following two essays by Jeremy Adler and Pavel Seifter were given as addresses at the Conference which celebrated the 40th anniversary of the arrival in London of one thousand, five hundred and sixty-four scrolls from Czechoslovakia, where they came into the care of the Memorial Scrolls Trust. Having been ordered to be sent to the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Scrolls which derived from more than one hundred synagogues in Bohemia and Moravia, survived the war and eventually came to be housed under the auspices of the Trust in Westminster Synagogue in London.

The Czech Jewish community exercised an influence on modern European culture quite disproportionate to its tiny size. Franz Kafka has become emblematic for a vanished world, but he was by no means the only Jew from the Czech lands who helped to shape modernity. Others included Gustav Mahler, Karl Kraus and Sigmund Freud, who unlike Kafka left their homeland, and grew to prominence in Vienna, the capital of the Habsburg Monarchy. At the turn of the century, Prague fostered a unique and complex symbiosis comprising Czech, German and Jewish culture, in which values promoted by one group, such as the protestant Jan Hus's belief in the power of Truth, still echoed by Václav Havel in 1989, came to be shared by others. The pluralist symbiosis that produced this achievement has been decimated. The destruction began in 1939–45 when the Germans destroyed the Jews, and was completed after 1945 when the Czechs expelled the Germans. What was lost? Before the Shoah, in 1936, the Prague Jewish community boasted 35,425 members. Today, that number has dwindled to around fifteen hundred souls. In other words, Prague Jewry has shrunk to under 5 percent of its pre-war total. The city now has four Orthodox Rabbis, who minister to about twenty devout Jews. The larger liberal reform movement does not even own a synagogue.

The scrolls were silent witnesses to all that long history. They also witnessed the sad history of the communist period and even shared the fate of exile with the Jews. But now they are here, prepared to contribute to Jewish life again. Remarkably, they are set to play their role again in the revival of Czech and Moravian communities: Jewish but also non-Jewish, because not many Jews are left there. Some of the scrolls come from places where no Jews survived at all. Yet it is there that the scrolls help to revive the life, culture and community of the Czechs themselves. The stories of how the scrolls have been adopted by synagogues and communities throughout the world and especially the handful of stories of their repatriation are fascinating and enlightening.

Popular public opinion concerning the Jewish community of Latvia is that it is an 'exemplary and well-organised community', which experienced a great revival and has functioned efficiently since Perestroika and particularly since the fall of the USSR. Nevertheless, this assertion can be countered by multiple phenomena, such as the dramatic decrease of the number of Latvian Jewish community members, the abrupt increase of inter-marriages, and the clear transformation of references to self-identification of Latvian Jewry. This article seeks to shed light on different spheres of the Jewish life in post-communist Latvia, in order to analyse the impact of the demise of the Soviet system on the Jewish community in this area.

The European Jewish reality today confounds predictions of decline with demographic decline. We can see that predictions of Jewish decline don't mean that the data was wrong, but rather the interpretation of the data on Jewish life was wrong. To look at the inevitably flawed data and not see trends that cannot be altered is just bad futurology. The fact is (and we know it from our daily life, work life as well as leisure life) that today information is power. Without information about who we as Jews in Europe are, we cannot seriously build a future. The kind of information we need about ourselves is not just how many we are and where we are. This kind of information is sometimes impossible to know definitively. We really need to know what kind of Jews we are, what kind of Jewish identities form our being, what makes up Jewish identities today.

There are two aspects of this proposition. The first one depends on our understanding of the pluralist nature of European Jewry. The Jewish community of Europe is de facto pluralist, as any attempt to define the basis of our identity makes clear. Jews consider themselves as Jewish on religious, cultural, intellectual, ethnic or political grounds, and any combination of the above. That very diversity seems to be the only uniting factor that can hold together such a disparate group of people. Moreover Jews are also deeply influenced by the different national and cultural characteristics of the societies to which they belong. The classic basis for Jewish unity in Halakhah, Jewish law, has been seriously undermined by the fact of emancipation. What was formerly a total system encompassing all aspects of life, has effectively been reduced to only two areas where power remains with religious authorities, matters of status, who is a Jew and who may marry whom, and the particular form of religious practice they adopt.

The philosophical understanding of Wissenschaft continued to have an impact well beyond Hegel, even though the way Wissenschaft continued to see itself became more and more influenced by those disciplines which were then trying to establish themselves as Einzelwissenschaften and as independent of philosophy. Still, the attempt to constitute philosophy as fundamental to Wissenschaft was a trend of the early nineteenth century, because philosophy was uniquely qualified to provide methodological explanations and to decide, by speculative design or by experiment, what Wissenschaft could be and should be. Wissenschaft, on the basis of philosophy, could clarify the object of research, its domains and overall relevance, assess the method to be used and the objectives to be attained; it could provide the appropriate terminology, as well as a historical analysis and it would present the unifying view and integration against the dangers of too much specialisation.

The reign of Justinian (527–565 CE) was a period of significant legal activity: his administration produced two versions of the Justinian Code, the first in 529, and a second, revised version in 534. This code was designed to bring together all the laws that had been collected in earlier codes and those enacted since the last, the Theodosian Code of 438. In the process of compilation, obsolete or duplicate laws were removed, while the remaining laws were substantially edited. The Justinian Code remained in force in the Eastern Empire until the ninth century, while in the West it became influential in the twelfth century as the primary source of information about Roman law. The Justinian Code contains thirty-three laws relating to Jews. Additional laws are found in the Digest compiled in 533, which condensed and ordered the work of the Roman jurists, and in the Novels (new laws) of Justinian issued during his reign.

Introduction

Moonlight

Moonlight over Auschwitz

The Golden Calf

You are more than Beat (Carl Rakosi, 1903–2004) May in Jerusalm (In Memoriam: Yehuda Amichai)

mind-set Derrida

Porphyrio Porphyrio

San Francisco Bay Bridge Easy to Oakland: Chromatic Arcs

Die Erde aber war Irrsal und Wirrsal

Edward Kessler (ed.), A Reader of Early Liberal Judaism, Vallentine Mitchell, 2004, 200pp., £16.95, ISBN 0-8530-3592-X

Eva Tucker, Berlin Mosaic, Starhaven, 2005, 154 pp., £8.00, ISBN 0-9363-1522-9

Anthony Godfrey, Three Rabbis in a Vicarage, Larson Grove Press, London, 2005, 366 pp., £20.00, ISBN 0-9549-1090-7

William J. Fishman, East End Jewish Radicals, 1875–1914, Five Leaves Publications, Nottingham, 2005, 336pp., £13.99. ISBN 0-9071-2345-7

Rudolph Rocker, The London Years, (transl. Joseph Leftwich), Five Leaves Publications, Nottingham, 2005, 228pp., £14.99. ISBN 0-9071-2330-9

Adam Horowitz, Next Year in Jerusalem, HooHah Press, Stroud, £2.00.